Earlier this year, the scientific community stirred when the image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the galactic center of the Milky Way, was published. However, how do scientists actually create images? It takes petabytes of data from a virtual telescope the size of an entire planet. This cool video takes you behind the scenes to see how it all comes together.
Coming to you from Veritasium, this amazing video shows you how scientists created the famous image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Sagittarius A* lies an amazing 26,673 light-years from Earth, and thank god it contains 4.154 * 10^6 solar masses (the mass of our sun), or about 8.26 * 10^36 kg. To photograph it, scientists had to essentially create a telescope the size of an entire planet. That wasn’t possible, of course, so they used a globally existing array of eight radio observatories to create a virtual telescope the size of a globe. It’s an amazing achievement and a pretty neat story. Check out the video above to see how it was done.
Lead imagery used under Creative Commons, provided by the European Southern Observatory.
